120 looked like he'd run into a moving target today," Tony said. Bill Rigney told me once that one day in his first summer as a major- league manager he went out to the mound in the Polo Grounds to yank a veteran Giants relief man named Windy McCall, who had got nobody at all out during his brief stint that day. Rig said, "I walked out there and I said 'How are you?' and McCall said 'Great. How the hell are you?' So I never asked that question again." I TOOK a drive across the desert to visit the Indians in Tucson-in particular, to watch their two new genuine stars: Joe Carter, who rapped twenty-nine home runs last year and led both leagues with a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in; and Cory Snyder, the phenom sophomore, who, by sudden consensus, is said to have the best outfielder's arm in the majors. The Indians are try- ing to deal with an unaccus- tomed emotion-hope-and may make a real run at the leaders in the American League East. The most hopeful Indian of them all, I found- by far the most cheerful pitcher I talked to this spring-was Tom Candiotti, a youthful-looking, almost anonymous twenty-nine-year-old right-hander, who had been informed the day before by Tribe manager Pat Corrales that he would be the team's opening-day pitcher. A year ago, Candiotti was invited to Tucson for a look-see by the Indians, in spite of his most ordinary seven-year prior career, passed mostly in the bushy lower levels of the Milwaukee organization. He had a scattered 6-6 record while up with the Brewers, but had spent all of the previous, 1985 season in the mi- nors; three years before that, he sat out an entire season after undergoing el- bow reconstruction. Cleveland wanted to look at him because of some gaping vacancies on its own pitching staff and because Candiotti had experienced some recent success while throwing a knuckleball in a winter league in Puerto Rico. His early adventures with the flutterball in the American League last summer were a bit scary- he was 3-6 by mid- June-but he fin- ished up with an admirable 16-12 rec- ord, including seventeen complete games. Only scriptwriters fashion turnabouts like that, but Candiotti's help had come from a more reliable source-Phil Niekro, a forty-eight- year-old knuckleball grand master (only four other men in baseball his- r,.', tory were still active players at his age), whom the Indians picked up on waivers when the Yankees released him just before the 1986 season got under way. Niekro had won his three- hundredth game at the end of the pre- vious season, and he went 11-11 for the Tribe last year, his twenty-third in the majors; Candiotti and everyone else on the club gave him much of the credit for the younger man's wonder- ful record as well. "Knucksie is my guru," Candiotti told me. (Knucksie is Niekro: sorry.) "He coached me during every game and in between. Last year-early last year-I was trying to throw the knuckleball hard all the time. It was a nasty pitch but tough to control, so I was always in trouble-three and oh, two and one. He said, 'Listen, that's not the way to do it. First of all, you want the batter to swing at it. You don't want to go three and two all day. So take a little off it, make it look tempting to the bat- ter as it comes up to the plate.' I did that, and after a while I began to get a little more movement on my slower knuckler. I haven't come close to mastering anything yet, the way he has, but I'm better." The knuckleball looks particularly tempting if you are a lizard or a frog. It is thrown not off the knuckles but off the fingertips-off the fingernails, to be precise-which renders the ball spinless and willful. It meanders plateward in a leisurely, mothlike flight pattern, often darting prettily downward or off to one side as it nears the strike zone, which results in some late and awkward-looking flailings by the batter, sudden belly flops into the dust by the catcher, and, not uncom- monly, a passed baIlor a wild pitch. It is the inelegance of the thing that makes it so unpopular with most man- agers, I believe (some of them call it "the bug"), even though some distin- guished and wonderfully extended ca- reers have been fashioned by its wily Merlins, such as Wilbur Wood, who had two twenty-four-victory seasons in the course of his seventeen-year ten- ure (mostly with the White Sox) in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; Charlie Hough, of the Rangers, now in his eighteenth year in the big time; and, of course, Hoyt Wilhelm, who went into the Hall of Fame after twenty-one years of knuckling, with a record-let's say "all-time" this once: with an all-tÎme-record one thousand and seventy game appearances. The pitch, in short, is unthreatening to MAY 4, 1987 a pitcher's arm, and I have often won- dered why it isn't practiced and ad- mired more widely. Candiotti, an agreeable fellow, told me that Niekro had emphasized that it was absol u tel y necessary for a knuckleballer to field his position well and to learn how to hold the runners close (Niekro's pickoff move is legend- ary), since the bug is unhurried in its flight and tends to spin weirdly when nubbed along the ground. "The pitch takes its time, you know," Tom said. I asked how much time, and he said that his knuckleball had been timed be- tween forty-eight and seventy-one miles per hour last year. "Seventy-one is slow, you understand," he said. "You just can't believe how easy on your arm this pitch feels. Knucksie keeps telling me that I'll go through a lot of frustrating days with the knuckleball, and sometimes you'll get racked up. But the thing to do is stay with it." Niekro pitched against the Giants that afternoon in beautiful little Hi Corbett Field, and tried his damnedest to stay with the pitch. It was a bright, windy afternoon (the knuckleball be- comes even more flighty in a breeze, or else refuses to perform at all), and Phil gave up four runs, including a couple of walks and two doubles, in his three- inning outing. The pitch seemed to arrive at the plate in stages, at the approximate pace of a sightseeing bus. Niekro, whom I found in the Indi- ans' empty clubhouse after his stint, was not much cast down. "1 haven't thrown a real knuckleball all this spring training," he said. "It's too dry here, and the wind keeps blowing. I can't sweat. Just can't get it right. If the knuckleball ain't there, I'm a mass of confusion. I can't defend myself with a fastball or a slider, like other pitchers. It seems like it takes me a little longer to find it each spring." He sounded like a man who had been going through his pockets in search of a misplaced key or parking- lot stub, and it came to me that I had sometimes had this same impression when listening to Dan Quisenberry, the Kansas City sidearm sinkerballer, talk about his odd little money pitch. Niekro said that this feeling around for the perfect knuckleball-this sense of search-was a year-round thing with him. "You've got to sleep with it and think about it all the time. It's a twenty-four- hour pattern," he said. "The margin for error is so slight, and it can be such a little-bitty thing -your release point, the ballpark,